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Gaza: Genocide, war and the need for a new solidarity

19 May 2018

(text of leaflet distributed at Palestine solidarity demonstration in Belfast)

The Gaza massacre marks a great clarification of the threat to the world posed by the US today. The massacre, the attacks on Syria, the threats to Iran, have all has changed the face of the Middle East and threaten workers across the globe.

The central event was the bizarre masquerade at the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem while Palestinians were massacred a few miles away for the crime of trying to walk out of hell and back to their homes, seized by the Israelis in the orgy of ethnic cleansing that led to the foundation of the state.

Marie Antoinette said of the French peasants: "let them eat cake." Trump and his associates are saying to the Gazan refugees: "be still and die quietly."  The alliance were all assembled; the genocidal Netanyahu, his longstanding allies in property speculation represented by Jared Kushner, billionaire Zionist Adelson, who took out a full page advert in New York papers thanking Trump for delivering the Jerusalem embassy following large financial contributions, the right wing of the republican party and the Christian evangelicals, who hate Jews, support Hitler and who want Israel to bring forward Armageddon and the end of the world. Tying them all together was the Trump family corruption.

The Gaza massacre did not stand by itself. Trump has torn up the nuclear deal with Iran and Israel and the Western powers feel free to bomb Syria at will.

Yet it would be a mistake to see Trump as standing alone. For years US republicans have fought tooth and nail against the pretence that they were seeking a diplomatic solution in the area. Their critics have claimed that they had no alternative to diplomacy, yet they are quite open about their alternative: War with Iran, genocide in Gaza.

Like any decaying empire, the US is relying more and more on the threat and of military force, not only in the Middle East, but also against China and Russia. An emboldened Israel is armed with hundreds of nuclear weapons. We are all at risk. Alongside the threat of war runs a threat to civil rights as Israel and the West try to criminalise opposition by labelling it the new anti-semitism.

The new threats call for a new solidarity and a recent Dublin Palestine solidarity conference discussed many of the issues. The "two state'' peace deal has proved a cover for genocide. The solidarity movement should stand for a single secular state with democratic rights for all. The boycott campaign has helped tap into a growing disgust with Israeli savagery, but we have to go further and confront the complicity of a media that describe murder as "clashes" and governments who wash their hands and go on to business as usual with Israel.

This latest massacre is one of many, but it marks a new situation and an unabashed assertion of impunity by the US and Israel, new levels of complicity by both the Irish and British governments. All Irish supporters of Palestine need to come together and remobilise in the face of the new threat and forge a new movement, new policy and new tactics to face the growing threats.


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